Startup Idea: Twitter Job Board

It may seem crazy to some, but Twitter
is fast becoming a very useful recruiting tool. Job offers can
spread virally by tweets and be responded to. For many jobs, a
Twitter profile, with a link to a personal website, gives you as
good background on a person as a resume would.

So we think there's an opportunity to organize all that
recruiting activity and build a startup around it.

One way to do it would be simply to aggregate all
recruitment-related tweets and let people search that, and maybe
sell ads against searches like job search engine Indeed.com does
for regular job search (and Google
does for everything else). That job wouldn't be as simple as it
sounds as not all recruiting tweets are tagged as such, but maybe
they could be gathered with a combination of grabbing specific
keywords, user flagging and training users to use a specific
hashtag, and maybe even Amazon
Mechanical Turk.

A more elaborate model might involve offering companies to spread
their offers on Twitter to people who are looking for work for a
fee each time the company gets a qualified lead. This could work
by asking people to retweet the offer and then split the fee with
the person whose retweet got the lead. That would boost the job
offers' virality. At the same time, it probably wouldn't turn
into outright spam, as people would only retweet (and get a shot
at the money) if they thought one of their followers was
potentially interested. You could also ban people who abuse the
system.

Of course other startups could build this. Indeed.com, as we
mentioned, is the leader in job search on the web, and might
build something like this for Twitter. Hashable,
which already does professional networking on Twitter, might add
recruiting functionality. And the Twitter-but-not-really-Twitter
advertising startups like Ad.ly and TweetUp
(now PostUp) might expand into recruiting.

Here are more reasons we think this could work:

Recruiting is one of the best monetized verticals
online. Companies are always willing to pay up to
recruit the right people and for the right leads in recruiting.
This makes recruiting a very attractive category for startups.

This is one area where we don't think Twitter will
crush a platform app. Twitter tends to either acquire
or make irrelevant apps on its platform, but these are mostly
apps that, in the words of Twitter board member Fred Wilson,
"fill holes on Twitter." Recruiting is a significant and
separate enough vertical that it's probably safe.